Editorial: Water surge buffeting wind power investment

Only in the Northwest can utilities mix wind and water – and get combustion.

The region’s biggest wind generators last week complained to federal regulators that the Bonneville Power Administration has cut them off its transmission grid for several hours in the early morning almost every day since May 18. They are losing revenue and, more significantly for some, tax credits enacted to encourage wind development.

With the Columbia River and its tributaries swollen from rain and much above average snowpack, dam generators are spinning for all they’re worth. So are the hundreds of windmills strung along every gusty ridgeline.

Utilities just do not need all that juice before breakfast.

But dam generation cannot be adjusted during a period when flows in the Columbia Basin are the fourth highest on record. If the water does not go through the turbines, then it must be dumped over spillways. That creates another problem: excess dissolved gases harmful to salmon and other fish protected by the Endangered Species Act.

The region’s nuclear, coal and natural gas plants are already on the sidelines. Capable of producing 7,000 megawatts of electricity, they are generating a mere 100 megawatts.

Bonneville estimates about 80,000 megawatt-hours of wind energy, each one enough to sustain 700 homes, have been curtailed. The alternative, the agency says, is paying other generators not to operate.

That, Bonneville refuses to do.

The cost would have to be passed on to the customers of Northwest utilities such as Inland Power & Light Co. and Kootenai Electric Cooperative. But those customers typically use less than 20 percent of the electricity generated by the region’s wind farms.

Why should they pay?

Normally, California is the outlet for any electricity the Northwest has to spare, but that state has its own wind and water issues.

The wind industry dismisses Bonneville’s arguments regarding fish, or a lack of markets for surplus electricity. Taking wind farms off the grid is discriminatory and a violation of transmission contracts. If Bonneville gets away with it, further investment in wind energy – already about $6 billion in the region – might vanish into thin air.

And even during spring runoff, wind energy lowers energy costs for everyone.

Given the complexity of the electricity supply contracts and credits, neither Bonneville nor the industry can estimate the costs of the ongoing curtailments. Both sides are looking for solutions, a good thing because the problem will likely recur every spring for some time.

Bonneville Administrator Steve Wright calls the effort to balance wind and water a grand experiment. The Northwest was supposed to be the perfect place for wind because dam reservoirs would serve, in effect, as batteries during periods of light breezes or none at all.

In this extraordinary year, the batteries are overcharged.

Better use that power for light, not heat.